Business is a gas for Orlando-based blimp entrepreneur

Despite the rough-and-tumble business of keeping a blimp afloat, it's hard to sense from Julian Benscher that his airships are anything but whimsical and fun.

"Who doesn't love a blimp?" the Windermere entrepreneur asks. He's one of the world's leading lighter-than-air businessmen, the son of a former British tycoon and once an investor with boy-band promoter Lou Pearlman.

At 47, Benscher is wiry and shaves his head to support his youngest son, 11, who can't grow hair because of a condition called alopecia. And he steers talk away from Julian Benscher the person to Julian Benscher the enthusiastic promoter of rebranding an old thing — blimps — with new life.

He owns seven of them, but only one is currently flying. It is the world's largest, containing 250,000 cubic feet of helium and equipped with a gondola 38 feet long. He'll sell it to you for $7 million or $8 million.

Blimps are serene, even silly to some. But their whalelike physiques conceal extraordinary complexities, Benscher explained.

For example, as 200-foot airship rises, its helium expands and increases in pressure. Something has to give, or the blimp would burst. So in its gut are large bags of ordinary air. Rising pressure squeezes those bags, forcing them to pass air into the atmosphere, averting a rupture.

"It's deceptively complicated to design, build and develop an airship," said Benscher, president of Skyship Services Inc.

Orlando is headquarters for Benscher's company and for another flier, Van Wagner Communications LLC, which bills itself as the world's largest operator of airships.

Together, they account for three-quarters of the dozen or so active blimps in the United States. Central Florida weather is nice to the ships. But they stay widely scattered to advertise, televise sports and, with Benscher's, ferry sophisticated instruments.

Benscher works hard at convincing scientists and government agencies that his stable craft is ideal for lasers, radar, heat-sensing optics, cameras and other instruments that are getting more portable and precise.

His well-practiced pitch is that when attached to his blimp the devices can spot or measuresuch things as power lines on the verge of failure because of hot spots; elevations of coastlines vulnerable to sea rise; structural weaknesses of bridges; and, one day possibly, chemicals of improvised-explosive devices.

"Julian has certainly been around the blimp business for a long time and knows blimps better than most people," saidJohn Haegele, chief executive officer of Van Wagner Airship Group. "It's a very esoteric business, and for something that seems so simple on the surface, it can be terribly complicated."

Benscher's workload, a combination of marketing, maintenance and employee management, has been daunting recently.

He rented out his ship for coast-to-coast filming by British television, scrambled to get helium in short supply, worried as his crew slipped the not-so-nimble aircraft through a mountain pass, lost work to the government shutdown and negotiated for a short-term business of flying Las Vegas tourists on a blimp for hundreds of dollars a seat.

His other blimps are currently disassembled and empty of helium as Benscher hustles to find more business. His blimps lease for about $600,000 a month, which includes pilots, ground crew and vehicles.

Benscher was born and raised in London, and steeped in the wheeling and dealing of his father, Gabi Benscher, the eccentric chairman of a sports-gear and clothing company.

Though his father died in a fall when Benscher was 13, he followed his father in the high art of creative finance. He studied it in school and then mounted an audacious but failed attempt to start blimp-borne advertising in Hong Kong, bringing almost no money to the table.

He had been fascinated with them since he was a kid. And as buyouts, selloffs and trades unfolded, he teamed with another aficionado of lighter-than-air commerce, Lou Pearlman in Orlando.

Ultimately, Pearlman's empire crashed; his blimp ventures deflated with lost business and wrecked airships. Benscher ejected himself from the partnership, and then he, too, got out of blimps in the 2000s.

He's definitely back. Now in London, he is in talks over leasing his blimp to patrol for poachers in Africa.